Notes From the Underground: A Feminist Pornographer in Moscow, 1992

from The Independent, March 1992

July’s stars blaze. Lights within the 6,000 dull glass rectangles of the Hotel Rossiya are extinguished. Somewhere behind us a Los Angeles film executive passes a guard five US dollars, pushing through the iron gate to take his midnight plunge into the feathery blue Moscow river. The sound of his long body breaking the glassy surface is explosive.

Ahead the Hotel Rossiya shimmers, pierced on its four symmetrical sides by 6,000 windows, 6,000 rooms. The Mezzanine Terrace Restaurant is mobbed. We push into a babble of languages, squeezed between flutters of fabric, colors, textures, perfumes. The gypsy orchestra plays rock and rock—Stevie Wonder, heavy on the violins. A Bengali film director is bribing a waiter for bottles of champagne. The Berlin film producer presses dollar bills into a waiter’s hand, and a table and chairs materialize for his group. Vladimir and I drink the burning shots of vodka passed around and then join the shrieking dancers.

On the opening night of the Moscow Film Festival, Fuses is screened as a short following Heavy Petting by Obie Benz. The audience seems stunned; not a chair squeaks. Vladimir, assigned by the festival to be my personal translator, is transfixed. I feel his breath move with the film cuts, all the risks it represented in 1965 renewed in this hushed Moscow theater 24 years later.

The next morning we meet in the lobby. “Vladimir, I’ve been trying to phone you. I’ve been here only one day and the phone in my room is dead!”
“Moscow joke! Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ve been here 35 years and this morning my phone is also dead.”

Trying to find out which films are showing where and when is an easy-going sort of adventure in chaos. Notices appear and disappear, like the piles of rubble left around building projects.

Moscow joke: Our workers always leave some piles of debris so the cold, characterless consistency of the new apartments have an organic reminder nearby of life’s imperfections.

In the Hotel Rossiya lobby everyone involved in the Moscow Film Festival mills about, looking for someone or being looked for. Film directors, famous and unknown, entrepreneurs, journalists, photographers, actors, actresses from all over the world—all suffer the indignity of squeezing past each other through the only open door where a guard firmly checks the IDs hanging on strings around our necks.

We are looking up at the walls with today’s sidebar film listings. In addition to its opening night screening, Fuses was supposed to run repeatedly as a short throughout the one-week festival. All the titles for “Sexuality in American Films” are listed in both English and Russian—except Fuses.

“Vladimir, my film isn’t on the schedule for this afternoon! Let’s go to the office and ask.”
“But they typed the program. Wait here, they’re calling the movie house.... They said, ‘The projector is broken.’”
Vladimir, go back please. Ask them how can there be only one 16mm projector in Moscow, film capital of the Soviet Republic, during the International Film Festival.”
He goes to the telephone once more. “They said, ‘That’s a very clever question.’”

Meeting many young English-speaking translators, writers, teachers, and artists, I sense a gender split. Among the men, there is a shared irony and skepticism. But among the young women, sadness, cynicism, and desperation dominate. They face an almost certain defeat of creative identity: highly-educated women do not make proportionately higher salaries; marriages are compressed in assigned housing and suffer all the woes reported in the western press—lack of space, etc. Women anticipate the prospect of a rigorous job, raising children often all on their own, and the struggle to provide for daily sustenance. Ambiguity, metaphor, irony, layers of personal and historical meaning move smoothly in intense conversations. At home, I disbelieved much of what I read about the Soviet Union, mistrusting the grimness described as exaggerated, while my Russian friends believed the veiled information they received on Western society—shaded luxury, greed, plenitude, indulgences of creative and material possibilities. With perestroika, many of the intelligentsia traveled to Europe and the States for the first time. They say, “It is exactly as I imagined.”

I pester Vladimir with questions about managing with scarcities. He tells the domestic joke of his week. The good news: His grandfather (a retired mathematician) stood in line for three hours to purchase three bars of soap for the family. The bad news: Although the grandfather also waited in another line for several hours, he could not get any toilet paper. The good news: Even though they have not had any toilet paper for months, now when they wipe with their fingers, they can wash off with the new soap.

This is an economy in which soap, tampons, condoms, toilet paper, diapers, and underwear are usually unavailable. The demeaning daily struggle exhausts everyone. How can I discuss an equitable, expressive sexuality in which neither partner is subject nor object—a female examination of erotic intimacy—and not have this seem a luxury?

Moscow joke: Many friends and visitors bring gifts of Walkmen and music cassettes, but we have no batteries to run them.

Moscow joke: When light bulbs burn out and there are none to replace them, we read by the light of the TV.

The absence of consumer goods in the Soviet Union underscores the erotic materialism with which the US economy diverts both political will and social engagement and measures social function. For us, indulgence in the consumer economy is an erotic act and a contribution to an illusory societal well-being. Our consumer culture provides levels of expressiveness—a connection to products as artifacts with which we can involve and satisfy our essential needs and nonessential desires. In the Soviet Union, there is no such relief or distraction from a grim, boring struggle to provide for basic needs. Capitalism and communism stand like inverted hourglasses draining sands of gross profusion, gross scarcity.

“Vladimir, let’s go to the office and ask what’s going on today.” Svetlana greets me, “How’s your room? Are you enjoying yourself? We are typing Vladimir’s Russian translation of the critics’ notes on Fuses, as you requested. Your film is definitely scheduled for midnight tomorrow at the cultural center; no problem.”

Vladimir manages to arrange for a TV crew and journalists to meet with us at each scheduled screening of Fuses. We will have interviews about the film process if it’s shown, or concerning censorship/perestroika if it is not. I continue my reading of the Introduction to Marxism pamphlets given me by the Soviet airline Aeroflot. Alone on the narrow bed in the narrow room, my mind spins between reform and repression, repression and reform. What is being censored? Where does my will to demystify intersect with their will to posit psychotic taboos as normal, sexual repulsion as idealization?

Everything seems familiar but results from a different historical event. Perestroika may invite its version of “a thousand flowers to bloom,” but reactionary forces—as close under the surface of change as those in China—could emerge to punish the persons and institutions effecting liberalization. There may be a happier spirit these days in Moscow, but its translucent underside admits the Russian “dark soul.” They have no faith, no optimism. The attempted censorship of Fuses remains a small index of the wavering forces for liberalization.

We were walking in a large park—lovely, gloomy. A young couple passed us, arm in arm. She was wearing navy blue shorts. Our Moscow friends are debating: “She’s foreign.” “No, Russian!” “She must be foreign.” “No, you can do that now.” “What? Walk arm in arm?” “Until last year she would have been arrested for wearing shorts—indecent exposure.”

At home facing the Shawngunk cliffs I can write anything I wish about this trip to Russia. Even though Fuses is a small fish in the festival pond, it causes consternation, conflict. I am considered “a pornographer” and “a dangerous woman.”

"Vladimir, here’s the program for tonight. Fuses isn’t listed.”
“Wait for me in the dining room; I’ll go find out.... They said, ‘Don’t worry, this isn’t the final program.’”

The bed is narrow as a child’s bed. Arms enfold me, a body stretches beside mine. His shadow rising, whispers in English, “I must go home now.”

I try to guess how far he must walk to reach the family apartment. Small room cluttered with books, manuscripts, journals, dumbbells, music cassettes. Later that week we hear about the raid on the hotel. Young women, without proper ID cards—called “prostitutes”—have managed to sneak past the guards to be lovers with foreign men in the film festival. The police arrested many of them. Have Russian men been arrested recently for being in the room of a foreign woman after 11 p.m.?

Soviet joke: Everyone agrees we need better sex education and freer pleasurable sexuality to help the many marriages which flounder on sexual repression. Birth control is a key, but there are no condoms or I.U.D.s or spermacide or....

What radical economic changes can avert the grinding contradictions everyone endures?

“Vladimir, we’ve invited all those artists and journalists and the film isn’t listed on tonight’s schedule!”
“I’ll get you a vodka, wait here for me on the stairs.... They said, ‘The projector is being fixed—tomorrow, no problem.’”

Fallen down on the rough green carpet which wraps the length of 6,000 identical rooms. So drunk—imagine we are spinning into a resort hotel by the sea in a forgotten part of the world where I’ve never been, this best friend at my side, devoted, stolid, caring, whose shoulder my hair falls over; he is holding my hands so I will not fly out the window; who knows we could be arrested for prostitution, for “uncivil behavior” lying here on the sixth floor hallway of the Hotel Rossiya, our lips merging in an unexpected gesture of glasnost.

Moscow joke: How do you know your business deal is underway with a Lithuanian? When he tells you, “Don’t worry, your check is in my mouth and I won’t come in your mailbox.”

Moscow joke: Do not ask more than two questions a day—it will overburden the system.

Behind the sharp, ironic perceptions of my Russian friends, a deep Western influence merges with Russian metaphysical traditions to fuel profound longings: to be released from paranoia and punishing consequence, to express convictions, passions outlawed for the past 70 years. It is impossible for us to realize Stalinist terror. The suppression left not one person, place, or thing unscathed. How do the Russian people contemplate a life of unchanged economic scarcity and hardship in the new context of frankness and creative expressiveness? All this produces an odd social atmosphere of tension and graciousness. (Last night in my little red-walled room, his legs layered across mine, Vladimir exclaimed, “I feel relaxed! This might be the first time I’ve felt relaxed since I was a child in the Ukraine!” We drink another vodka to soften the contradictions.)

Back in the US, friends say, “Well, if it’s like that, why don’t they rebel?” I tell them what the Lithuanian rock drummer told me in the airport on his way to an unprecedented gig at Lincoln Center: “For 70 years they fought and destroyed, fought and destroyed. Nothing was left intact, nothing. They never found a compromise. They never achieved a concept which was not destruction. They never made a positive step.”

Moscow joke: See that huge office building in the center of our city? Do you notice that it has two symmetrical sides with different facades? How curious; why is that? The architect took two designs to Stalin for his choice. Stalin was very busy, he looked down at the layout and said, “Fine.” Unable to have another interview, the architect built half of each design.

The legislated “equality” of women in the Soviet Union has been used against them—to standardize their social and maternal contributions, just as artists have been required to fulfill social realism to idealize the State mythology if they are to participate in any of the rewards of the State: a studio, relatively decent housing, positions with reasonable salaries, etc. Female “equality” has been defined by a sexist, male-dominated, authoritarian society. Feminist analysis, which has exposed and dismantled suppressive male cultural traditions in the West, is only now resurfacing in the Soviet Union after a hiatus of 40 years. During the Russian Revolution, women’s rights were legislated: equal pay for equal work, guaranteed child care, maternal leave, abortion on request. But with all they lost in the second World War, the Soviets also lost connection to Western cultural contexts, including the exploration of human sexuality as evinced in the works of Freud, Reich, Jung, as well as Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and other feminists. So this innocent “pornographer” or “dangerous woman” introduces echoes of early Russian radicalism. Where did it get them back then? Only greater repressions, as if such consciousness stirs tyrannic self righteousness to greater justification and outrage. As recent critics have written about Jesse Helms’s attempted suppression of erotic art, we are looking at the same thing, but seeing completely different things.

Moscow joke: What’s the difference between Romania and Auschwitz? In Auschwitz they had gas and light! (Treading our way down four flights of broken stone stairs with no light whatsoever from the apartment of a celebrated film director.)
At the PROCC cultural center a crowd mills around the ticket desk and swirls away. Vladimir’s face is turning red, his eyes enlarged. “What’s going on now?” I ask, my skin prickling.
“Look at this!” he shouts. Posted on the wall, the program of tonight’s midnight showing has an X drawn across it. “Yes, that showing is canceled,” says the helpful young woman at the desk.

Tiny Mme. Lavritskaya (director of Soviet Sexual Education Programs), who considers me a “pornographer,” is pushing through the crowd. She’s probably responsible for this, I think, glowering down at her; but she is genuinely alarmed, stunned, asking Vladimir in Russian, “What’s happened to the film screening?” Video crews, journalists are setting up lights around me.

“Get me a double vodka now. Get the print of Fuses in my hands before there is any interview or discussion; I will not leave this building until I have my print. If they do produce the print I will not be photographed here in front of these degraded, suppurating oil paintings of nudes (females, of course). And I want an explanation for the cancellation."
Vladimir agrees, “In a bureaucratic cultural center like this, there’s a bureaucrat to be found.”

I have left Vladimir with all my books and magazines, tins of sardines, herrings, vodka, and chocolates from the special store for foreign currency. He’s arranged with a network of journalist friends traveling in Europe to forward his letters to me in the States and has given me an address where I can write to him with less chance of my letters disappearing. He hugged me, held me, pushed me into the lines straggling towards inspection and the departure gate. The flight will be on Pan Am, not Aeroflot. The hours and the crowd seep into disjunctive, exhaustive delays. Leaving my place on the floor, I struggle through crowds to get a bottle of water, but there is no more. Only the Americans settle down on the floor, leaning their shiny heads on each other’s hips and rucksacks, accepting the delay of one hour, two hours, three hours, as nap time.

The overt attempt to censor Fuses—as if it among all the “sexual” films was “too much”—differs from the classic response in the US: the implicit suppression of rewards, recognitions withheld from those feminist artists who pioneered essential, lost meanings of the body. Nonetheless, I could describe a common paternalistic morality in which the the sacred erotic and the lived experience of female sexuality are denigrated. I recognize the same male structures which disguise fantasies and which mask fears of the unconscious, the forces of nature, the female body. I recognize familiar posturing: the heroic at the expense of the domestic; authoritarian delusion at the expense of ecological common sense.

Crushed into a line, entering the steel body, collapsed into the narrow seat. The steward down the aisle pushing a drinks cart asks, “Would you like juice? Apple, grapefruit, or orange?” Large unexpected tears begin to seep down my cheeks. I say, “Orange!” In two weeks I’d completely forgotten such a drink existed. Balancing the glass of juice, reaching for the headphones and clamping them on, I hear the voice of Bill Cosby trashing President Reagan. A flood of tears takes me by surprise. The plane taxis, lifts off. In my heart I am blessing my unknown Russian ancestors who long ago left this vast green sparkling expanse and whose leaving added to the random toss of my own life, so that I can depart Russia, having been only an invited guest of the 1989 Moscow Film Festival, their own “pornographer and dangerous woman.”